China Heavyweight looks into how former Asian champion Qi Moxiang (pictured) trains poor teenagers from China's remote areas to become boxers. Sun Shaoguang / for China Daily

A knockout year for cinema

Small screen, big ideas

A documentary on boxing in China has won global acclaim, but Yung Chang says his delicate character study of success and sacrifice has only an outside chance of becoming a box-office knockout at home. Mike Peters talks to the filmmaker.

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang says taking his boxing film to the theaters is a crapshoot. "The box-office draw of a documentary is unpredictable."

But Yung is eagerly rolling the dice with China Heavyweight, which opened on Dec 20 in more than 200 cinemas across the country. The film won best documentary at the 2012 Golden Horse Film Awards in Taiwan, best film at the recent Milano Film Festival and was nominated for a Sundance Grand Jury Prize last year.

"It's not a nationwide release, but it's the biggest scale for an art-film release in China," he says.

A character study, China Heavyweight tells the story of Qi Moxiang, a master trainer and former Asian champion who recruits poor teenagers from China's rural areas and transforms them into boxing champions.

"We wanted to make a big film, to tell a Hollywood-style story in a very cinematic way for the big screen-not the cellphone," says Yung.

"I hope this is a new kind of documentary in China, a new way of telling real stories in cinematic form."

While Yung says he likes to think of his film as an action movie, with plenty of pace and energy, his team doesn't simply package a steady stream of fight sequences for viewers. While the physicality is intense, the film is essentially a character study, exploring the meaning of failure and success, and what it takes to train to be a winning fighter.